


Ceasefire

by AceQueenKing



Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-12 09:10:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17464625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceQueenKing/pseuds/AceQueenKing
Summary: Erik is hurt in an attack, and Charles grants him and Raven permission to stay with him for the night.





	Ceasefire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



“Charles.”  
  
His hand catches on his door, the brass of the knob held frozen under his fingertips. He doesn't need to ask who it is calling to him from his own bed – only Erik could be so cruel as to render him speechless with just the utterance of his name.  He glances up at the “nurse” helping wheel him into his room and saw familiar yellow eyes peeking out from behind the veil of dark hair in front of her eyes. Of course, Raven. He shouldn’t have listened to Scott, hadn’t wanted a nursemaid, but Scott had insisted, and he had finally given up, after Stryker. He’d been hurt, weakened by the events of the last few weeks himself. Losing Jean, overtaxed by Cerebro -- he is weak, and he allowed that weakness to give them a way in. And, as always, here are Erik and Raven, responding to the unknown invitation: whether to kill Charles or to help him, he did not know.

For a second – and only a second – he is ashamed to admit he thinks of calling Scott, or Logan, of having Erik thrown out of his house – but then he thinks of times gone by, of tea and rainy day afternoons and a wet boy and a soaked girl climbing onto his boat, and his fingers complete the turn of the knob before his mind can stop it.

Raven wheels him into the room cautiously, as if she is afraid he’ll jump up and fight her. Those days are long gone, he is afraid. He remains outwardly calm; despite the way his mind is roiling, he keeps his face placid. Raven was never the only one in the Xavier family who learned to hide her secrets, and he keeps the mask of the teacher firmly on his face.

Erik is lying on his bed, his clothing scraped and torn; a trickle of blood on his mouth, a larger gash of it staining the sheets below on his stomach. A bad wound, even for someone as used to suffering as Erik; he's breathing heavily. “Charles,” Erik says softly. “Your students have gotten much better in their aim.”  
  
“You are making sure they have plenty of practice, old friend,” he says. He moves a bit closer, takes over his own mobility, fingers threading the wheels with an eagerness that makes him sick. He moves one-inch closer; two. He stops, Erik's fingers just temptingly out of reach.

There was a time when he could stand to reach for them.

No longer.

Raven’s fingertips close upon his shoulder, whether a threat to remind him that she is there, or a loving caress or both: he does not know. It does not matter.

Erik's lips curl into a slow and subtle smirk. The sort that would have made him weak in the knees when he was younger, but now only reminds him of how cruel Erik can sometimes be. “I should throw you out,” Charles says, wondering if perhaps Erik would in his stead. He doesn’t think so. Erik likes poking at his wounds too much to cast him entirely adrift.

“Please, Charles.” He tries to get up, grunts. “I don’t ask you to take care of me; just…let me rest, a bit. We’ll be gone before morning.”  
  
_You don’t have to be_ , he almost says, but doesn’t. The year for that is long past, long before Stryker, before New York, before whatever scheme Erik was cooking up this time, before whatever scheme it will be the next time.

“Charles,” Raven says, and he looks up into beautiful grey-blue eyes. “Please,” she whispers, her old voice coming out of a face he hasn’t seen in years. She’s hiding her true form, because she remembers he prefers to think of her in old disguises; _you can be yourself_ , he whispers. _I’ve grown._

But even as a telepath, he doesn’t tell her that directly. Instead, he grabs her hand, squeezes it.  

“One night.” He says softly, then, to her: “Can you….help me, Ra…Mystique?” He knows she no longer prefers her old name, but he can never think of her anything else. _It’s my slave name_ , she said once; he never knew it as that. 

With more tenderness than any other, she lifts him from the wheelchair, places him next to Erik, curls his body into the sleeping position that somehow, after forty years of fighting, she still remembers that he always winds up in. She walks over to the electric kettle on the table, grabs it to get some water. He watches her, but Erik watches him, his fingers threading through Charles’ own. He looks back traitorously, to dark blue eyes that look at him like a sea grinding itself desperate for a shore it can’t reach.

“We can’t keep doing this, Charles,” Erik says, soft; his eyes closing as Charles glides his hand across Erik’s silver hair. He’s right, of course, in the way that Erik often is, but Charles is old enough to know Erik won’t throw down the sword any time soon. He hears the hiss of the kettle as Raven puts it to boil, some towels in her hand.

“No politics,” Charles whispers. He reaches out a hand to Raven, and she takes it, squeezing it and infusing him with a comfort he’s ashamed to admit he still feels. “Not tonight.”

“Ceasefire,” Raven says, with a smirk. The kettle howls, and she’s gone, silencing it. In years past, they might have enjoyed this moment, the three of them in bed, having tea. Now, they use it for nothing so relaxing and kind.

Now Raven pours the water onto one of his black towels; Charles, with surgical precision, opens Erik’s shirt. She hands him a towel to disinfect his hands; he takes it, and then a second towel, that he presses to Erik’s heavy wound.

Raven’s hand interlaces over his own, Erik’s two loves holding his blood in his body. He whimpers, and Raven kisses his cheek with a soft _shh_. Charles’ heart breaks like ice coming unmoored from the docks; he hopes that Raven is good to him. He wishes he could be.

“Charles,” Erik says, all wounded animal moans, as their hands clean the wound. It’s not so bad he won’t heal. Raven grabs a needle and thread, pours hot water over it, and Charles grabs Erik’s face, holding him tight as she seals up the wound. Erik grunts and moans; even in all his stoicism, he is unable to hide his pain. Charles kisses him, fingers desperately wound around Erik’s silver hair, as if he can make him forget.

He tastes Erik’s pain; he tastes of salt and iron.

“Be brave, old friend,” Charles whispers. Erik stares at him with the sad, familiar madness that has enraptured him all his life.

“Almost done,” Raven says; she’s shed the glamour in her concentration, and Charles notes how foolish he was, to think her anything less than beautiful. She’s aged better than either of them, really; he wonders if she might be the last one standing. He wouldn’t be surprised; Raven’s always been a survivor. Erik exhales a shaky sigh as she snips the thread, wraps a bandage she must have found in Charles’ bathroom around his middle.

“Done,” she says.  She takes the supplies, returns them to their proper places, and slides into bed on the other side of Erik. Her arm meets Charles’, and he sees the whirl of her changeling powers, as she tries to returning back to what he insisted she wear as a child.

“Don’t,” he says, his voice a sleepy blur. “Stay...as you are.”

She startles, but does. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Erik murmurs; he reaches a shaky hand back, and Raven grabs it, and after a moment’s hesitation, Charles does, as well, and for a moment, they are as they were one long summer ago, bound together as one.

“You both are,” he admits, because here, surrounded by his most dire enemies, he can be nothing but truthful. Raven pulls the covers over them, and he curls his arm right around them both, as if by holding them, they’ll stay.

He knows they will be gone before morning, but his traitorous eyes close, even as he strives to remember every detail: Raven’s fingers sliding along his knuckle, Erik’s face curled into his neck. He falls asleep before he knows it, straining to enjoy the quiet moments because he isn’t sure, truthfully, how many they have left.

When he wakes up alone, still curled into his bed in the position Raven left him in, he sobs for a moment; the pain of being the last one out never gets easier.

 But then he uses his arms to grab his wheelchair, swings himself into it as he has done for many years. Wheels himself to the bathroom, and tries not to notice the bloody towel on the floor. Brushes his teeth. Dresses. Does a hundred countless little tasks.

And then he goes out to start his day, starting the whole thing over again.


End file.
